August 8, 2014

THE DEQUEERING:

The gay movement has become very traditional and cowardly', says Julie Bindel. [...]

Her new book, Straight Expectations, offers a strident critique of the modern gay movement. Talking to me down the line from her home in north London, she traces the decline of the gay movement back to the establishment-led attack on gay people in the 1980s. After the AIDS panic and the Thatcher government's grotesque Clause 28, which banned local authorities, and in particular state-run schools, from 'promoting homosexuality' in education, Bindel feels there was a gradual shift to a more conciliatory agenda: 'The language became one of acceptance and tolerance rather than liberation and "[...] you". There was a desperate desire for a quiet life, to be left alone. The more radical voices of lesbian feminism, and the few gay men that were more radical, were drowned out.'

Bindel isolates gay marriage as one of the key manifestations of this shift towards conservatism. Gay marriage doesn't only spring from a desire to be 'left alone', she says - it also speaks to a quest for validation from the state. 'It's the desire to be in a traditional couple that's sanctioned by the state, rather than punished by the state', she says.